Lockheed
Runs Breathtakingly Big Part of United States

"It used to be just an airplane company. Now it's a warfare
company. It's an integrated solution provider. It's a one-stop shop. Anything
you need to kill the enemy, they will sell you."

-- John Pike, longtime military analyst and director of
GlobalSecurity.org, discussing role of Lockheed

Dear friends,

The
below article in the New York Times exposes very clearly what is
going on behind the scenes between the military and multinational defense
corporations. "In the post-9/11 world, Lockheed has become more
than just the biggest corporate cog in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the
military-industrial complex. It is increasingly putting its stamp on the
nation's military policies." The article also states that
"cost is essentially irrelevant when national security is at
stake."

Below
are excerpts from the original on the Times website, which is four
webpages long. For those with limited time, I've highlighted key passages
below in bold. For those with more time, I highly recommend combining
this article with General Butler's devastating expose on war at www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup.
By informing our friends and colleagues of these important matters, you
can help to build the critical mass necessary to bring about change and
build a brighter future. Thanks for caring.

Lockheed and the Future of WarfareBy TIM WEINERPublished:
November 28, 2004

Lockheed Martin doesn't run
the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it.

Over
the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has
built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the
Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It
cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs
space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes
more computer code than Microsoft.

Of
course, Lockheed, based in Bethesda, Md., is best known for its weapons,
which are the heart of America's arsenal. It builds most of the nation's
warplanes. It creates rockets for nuclear missiles, sensors for spy satellites
and scores of other military and intelligence systems. The Pentagon and the
Central Intelligence Agency might have difficulty functioning without the
contractor's expertise.

But in the post-9/11 world, Lockheed has become more than
just the biggest corporate cog in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the
military-industrial complex. It is increasingly putting its stamp on the
nation's military policies, too.

Lockheed
stands at "the intersection of policy and technology," and that
"is really a very interesting place to me," said its new chief
executive, Robert J. Stevens, a tightly wound former Marine. "We are
deployed entirely in developing daunting technology," he said, and that
requires "thinking through the policy dimensions of national security as
well as technological dimensions."

To
critics, however, Lockheed's deep ties with the Pentagon raise some
questions. "It's impossible to tell where the government ends and
Lockheed begins," said Danielle Brian of the Project on Government
Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington that monitors government
contracts. "The fox isn't guarding the henhouse. He lives there."

No
contractor is in a better position than Lockheed to do business in
Washington. Nearly 80 percent of its revenue comes from the United States
government. Most of the rest comes from foreign military sales, many financed
with tax dollars. And former Lockheed executives, lobbyists and
lawyers hold crucial posts at the White House and the Pentagon, picking
weapons and setting policies.

Obviously,
war and crisis have been good for business. The Pentagon's budget for buying
new weapons rose by about a third over the last three years, to $81 billion
in fiscal 2004, up from $60 billion in 2001. Lockheed's sales also rose by
about a third, to nearly $32 billion in the 2003 calendar year, from $24
billion in 2001. It was the No. 1 recipient of Pentagon primary
contracts, with $21.9 billion in fiscal 2003. Boeing had $17.3
billion, Northrop Grumman had $11.1 billion and General Dynamics had $8.2
billion.

LOCKHEED
also has many tens of billions of dollars in future orders on its books. The
company's stock has tripled in the last four years, to just under $60.

"It used to be just an airplane company," said
John Pike, a longtime military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a
research organization in Alexandria, Va. "Now it's a warfare company.
It's an integrated solution provider. It's a one-stop shop. Anything you need
to kill the enemy, they will sell you."

As
its influence grows, Lockheed is not just seeking to solve the problems of
national security. It is framing the questions as well:

Are
there too few soldiers to secure the farthest reaches of Iraq? Lockheed
is creating robot soldiers and neural software - "intelligent
agents" - to do their work. "We've now created policy
options where you can elect to put a human in or you can elect to put an
intelligent agent in place," Mr. Stevens said.

Does
the Department of Homeland Security have the best tools to protect the
nation? Lockheed has a host of military and intelligence technologies to
offer. "What they do for the military in downtown Falluja, they
can do for the police in downtown Reno," said Jondavid Black of
the company's Horizontal Integration Vision division. Lockheed is also
building a huge high-altitude airship, 25 times bigger than the Goodyear
blimp, intended to help the Pentagon with the unsolved problem of protecting
the nation from ballistic missiles. The airship, with two tons of
surveillance sensors, could be used by the Department of Homeland Security to
stare down at the United States, Lockheed officials said.

In
a pilot program for the department, Lockheed has set up spy cameras and
sensors on the U.S.S. New Jersey, anchored in the Delaware River, providing
24-hour surveillance of the ports of Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. The
program grew out of the Aegis weapons and surveillance systems for Navy
ships, and it soon may spread throughout the United States.

The
melding of military and intelligence programs, information-technology and
domestic security spending began in earnest after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Lockheed was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the shift. When
the United States government decided a decade ago to let corporate America
handle federal information technology, Lockheed leapt at the opportunity. Its
information-technology sales have quadrupled since 1995, and, for all those
years, Lockheed has been the No. 1 supplier to the federal government, which
now outsources 83 percent of its I.T. work.

Lockheed has taken over the job of making data flow
throughout the government, from the F.B.I.'s long-dysfunctional computer networks to
the Department of Health and Human Services system for tracking child
support. The company just won a $525 million contract to fix the Social
Security Administration's information systems. It has an $87 million contract
to make computers communicate and secrets stream throughout the Department of
Homeland Security. On top of all that, the company is helping to rebuild the
United States Coast Guard - a $17 billion program - and to supply, under the
Patriot Act, biometric identity cards for six million Americans who work in
transportation.

Lockheed
is also the strongest corporate force driving the Pentagon's plans for
"net-centric warfare": the big idea of fusing military,
intelligence and weapons programs through a new military Internet, called the
Global Information Grid, to give American soldiers throughout the world an
instant picture of the battlefield around them. "We want to know
what's going on anytime, anyplace on the planet," said Lorraine M.
Martin, vice president and deputy of the company's Joint Command, Control and
Communications System division.

Lockheed's
global reach is also growing. Its "critical mass" of salesmanship
lets it "produce global products for a global marketplace," said
Robert H. Trice Jr., the senior vice president for corporate business
development. With its dominant position in fighter jets, missiles, rockets
and other weapons, Lockheed's technology will drive the security spending for
many American allies in coming decades. Lockheed now sells aircraft and
weapons to more than 40 countries. The American taxpayer is financing
many of those sales. For example, Israel spends much of the $1.8 billion in
annual military aid from the United States to buy F-16 warplanes from
Lockheed.

Twenty-four
nations are flying the F-16, or will be soon. Lockheed's factory in Fort
Worth is building 10 for Chile. Oman will receive a dozen next year. Poland
will get 48 in 2006; the United States Treasury will cover the cost through a
$3.8 billion loan.

In
the future, Lockheed hopes to build and sell hundreds of billions of dollars'
worth of the next generation of warplanes, the F-35, to the United States
Army, Navy and Air Force, and to dozens of United States allies. Three years
ago, Lockheed won the competition to be the prime contractor for this
aircraft, known as the Joint Strike Fighter.

"It's
a terrific opportunity for us," said Bob Elrod, a senior Lockheed
manager for the F-35 program. "It could be a tremendous success, at the
level of the F-16 - 4,000-plus and growing." That would represent
"world domination" for Lockheed, he said.

In
the United States, where national security spending now surpasses $500
billion a year, Lockheed's dominance is growing. Its own executives
say the concentration of power among military contractors is more intense
than in any other sector of business outside banking.Three
or four major companies - Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and arguably
Boeing - rule the industry. They often work like general contractors
building customized houses, farming out the painting, the floors and the
cabinets to smaller subcontractors and taking their own share of the money.

AND, after 9/11, cost is hardly the most important
variable for Pentagon planners. Lockheed has now won approval to build as many F-22's as
possible. The current price, $258 million apiece, easily makes the F-22 the
most expensive fighter jet in history.

Mr.
Stevens, whose compensation last year as Lockheed's chief operating officer
was more than $9.5 million, says cost is essentially irrelevant when
national security is at stake. "Some folks might think, well,
here's a fighter that costs a lot," he said. "This is not a
business where in the purest economical sense there's a broad market of
supply and demand and price and value can be determined in that exchange.
It's more challenging to define its value."

Lockheed says it has transformed its corporate culture. In
the 1970's, it was discovered that the company had paid millions of dollars
to foreign officials around the world in order to sell its planes. In one case, Kakuei Tanaka, who
had been the prime minister of Japan, was convicted of accepting bribes.

Mr.
Trice, Lockheed's senior vice president for business development, says the
company cleaned up its act at home and overseas since the last of the series
of major mergers and acquisitions that gave the corporation its present shape
in March 1995. "You simply have to look people in the eye and
say 'we don't do business that way,' " he said.

There
really is no need to do business that way any more - not in a world where so
much of Lockheed's wealth flows directly from the Treasury, where competition
for foreign markets is both controlled and subsidized by the White House and
Congress, and where Lockheed's influence runs so deep. Men who have worked,
lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy,
secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex
and director of the national spy satellite agency. The list also includes
Stephen J. Hadley, who has been named the next national security adviser to
the president, succeeding Condoleezza Rice.

Former Lockheed executives serve on the Defense Policy
Board, the Defense Science Board and the Homeland Security Advisory Council,
which help make military and intelligence policy and pick weapons for future
battles.
Lockheed's board includes E. C. Aldridge Jr., who, as the Pentagon's chief
weapons buyer, gave the go-ahead to build the F-22.

None of those posts and positions violate the Pentagon's
rules about the "revolving door" between industry and government. Lockheed has stayed clear of the
kind of conflict-of-interest cases that have afflicted its competitor,
Boeing, and the Air Force in recent months.

"We
need to be politically aware and astute," Mr. Stevens said. "We
work with the Congress. We work with the executive branch." In these
dialogues, he said, Lockheed's end of the conversation is "saying we
think this is feasible, we think this is possible, we think we might have
invented a new approach."

Lockheed
makes about $1 million a year in campaign contributions through political
action committees, singling out members of the Congressional committees
controlling the Pentagon's budget, and spends many millions more on lobbying.
Its connections give Lockheed a "tremendous opportunity to influence
contracts flowing to the company," said Ms. Brian of the Project on
Government Oversight. "More subtly valuable is the ability of the
company to benefit from their eyes and ears inside the government, to know
what's on the horizon, what are the best bets for the government's future
technology needs."

SO
who serves as the overseer for the biggest military contractors and their
costly weapons? Usually, the customer itself: the Pentagon.

"Because
you have so few contractors, you don't get the level of attention that the
average citizen would think would be devoted to a program costing billions of
dollars," he said. "With this massive agglomeration into a very
small number of companies, you get far less visibility as to whether the
subcontractors are effectively managed. Problems accumulate."

Mr.
Stevens [Lockheed's CEO] sees a far grander vision. Lockheed, he said, is
promising to transform the very nature of war. During the cold war, when Lockheed and its
component parts built an empire of nuclear weapons, Mr. Stevens said, the
watchword was: "Be more fearful. 'Deterrence,' isn't that Latin?
'Deterrere.' Induce fear. Terrorize."

Today,
Lockheed is building weapons so smart that they can change the world by
virtue of their precision, he said; they aim to wage war without the death of
innocents, without weapons misfiring, without fatal miscalculation.

"I
know the fog of war exists," Mr. Stevens said, adding that it could be
lifted. "We envision a world where you don't have any more
fratricide," no more friendly fire, he said. "With technology we've
been able to make ourselves more secure and more humane.

"And
we aren't there yet - but we sure have pioneered the kind of work that is
taking us well along that trajectory. And there's a lot of evidence that says
we're doing well. And we're setting the bar high and we expect to be able to
do that. Now that's pretty exciting stuff.

"I don't say this lightly," he said. "Our
industry has contributed to a change in humankind."

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